Archive for the ‘Writers’ Category

From Jeff Bowles on Facebook on the 12th, this Magritte-based composition:

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Apparently a Magrittean disavowal (there’s a Page on such disavowals here), playing on Magritte’s wry late 1920s painting La Trahison des images (The Betrayal / Treachery of Images) — which shows a pipe, with the painting labeling itself Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’. Here we get Louis Flint Ceci, on the left, objecting in astonishment that what’s on the right is not (a) Ceci; instead, it’s (a) Davisson.

[The body of this posting vanished from WordPress on 4/23/19. Below is a summary of its content, without most of the original bells and whistles; when I finished the 4/13/19 posting, I deleted the files of background material for it, and I no longer have the heart to reconstruct it all. (By some software freak, the comments from the original posting were preserved.)

In the March 12th New Yorker, a Talk of the Town piece by Ian Parker on novelist Jay McInerney and his career writing fortune cookie fortunes: in print, “Pithy”; on-line, “When Jay McInerney writes your fortune: The novelist’s new line of fortune cookies are fit for a cynic: “If at first you don’t succeed, try Botox.””:

The immediate impetus for this posting is a “Fresh Air” piece on NPR on the 27th, “For ‘New York Times’ Obit Writers, ‘Death Is Never Solicitous Of A Deadline'”, in which NYT writers Margalit Fox and Bruce Weber were interviewed in connection with the appearance of the documentary Obit (released on 4/15/16) in theaters:

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Bruce Weber and Margalit Fox have written obituaries for thousands of people, ranging from heads of state to the inventor of the Etch-a-Sketch. They are featured in the new documentary Obit.

Posting a Zippy yesterday about F. Scott Fitzgerald reminded me of one of 2015’s more remarkable obituaries, for Frances Kroll Ring, who was Fitzgerald’s secretary and assistant. To put ths in context: Ring started working for Fitzgerald before I was born, and when the writer died, I was only three months old. Now I’m an old man, and Ring died only last June 18th (aged 99), a relic of times long gone by. Her story was told by J. R. Moehringer in the New York Times‘s “The Lives They Lived” issue on December 27th, under the heading “More Than a Secretary: She befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald and never let go”.

Right on the heels of fractured Proust, today’s Zippy brings us fractured Joyce:

The title, “You, Lizzie”, is a play on Ulysses, the title of James Joyce’s most famous work, a gigantic stream of consciousness re-working of the Odyssey (published in 1922) on the streets of Dublin in a single day (June 16th, 1904). The novel’s central character, Leopold Bloom, appears in the strip as Neapolitan Gloom, and James Joyce (caricatured here, dressed in a Pinhead muumuu) has become Jimmy Joust.

A recent Zippy, continuing a series with burlesques of quotes from famous writers (previously: Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Joan Didion):

This time it’s Marcel Proust (under the name Darnell Prouty — cue Olive Higgins Prouty, author of the 1922 novel Stella Dallas and the 1941 novel Now, Voyager, both of which became famous in adaptations, as a movie and a radio soap opera in the first case and a movie in the second). Once again, the writer is caricatured, dressed in a Pinhead muumuu. With the quotations amended by references to snack foods (Chips Ahoy and Little Debbies) and pop culture figures (Rosemary Clooney, Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas).